Do I Need and Egress Window for My Home? Hire It Done Radio Interview
We’re a family business. We do everything. The whole process from coming out and looking at the job and telling you the how, the why about the job. We don’tsub anything out. We do the excavating, we cut the concrete, we cut the block walls all ourselves. So you’re dealing with us all the way through the process and nobody else.
this is Hire I Done and my name is Adam Helfman. We’ve got the Contractor Spotlight and in the studio with me this morning is Mr. Anthony Ioppolo from Easy Exit Egress Windows. Good Morning Anthony. How you doing my friend?
Good. How are you doing?
Thanks for coming in.
Thank you Adam.
It’s been a good year for you.
Yeah, it’s been busy.
So let’s introduce you to the Hire It Done audience. Tell everyone a little bit about Easy Exit.
Well, we’re a family business out of Macomb, Michigan. We specialize in egress windows and we started our business in 2014. My nephew and my brother and I, Adam and Gary, we started it because we thought we could do things better with the egress business, um, and better insulation all the way around.
Well, you know, it’s funny because Egos, when there’s only came into play, you know, not more than 10, 15 years ago, we had them in the past, but the importance of them really has been accentuated late as of late. And so anybody who’s finishing a basement, anyone who actually follows like code and permits needs an egress window. So I’m assuming a business must be booming for you.
Yeah, it really is. It’s booming. And the other, there’s a few other reasons people do get the egress windows. When they’re adopting a child, foster care, home day care centers, they all need egress, windows in their basement.
And it’s code, it make sense.
So you guys have competition, right? They’re all out there. They, you know, every, all of a sudden somebody decides they want to be an egress window guy, they’re like, ah, I’m mister egress. You know what I’m saying? So what makes you better than the competition?
Well, what I heard from our customer feedback, um, why they’ve hired us over other contractors is we spend the time to go out, take a look at every job. We’re the ones doing the work. You know, I don’t send someone out there that doesn’t know what’s going to happen. So we explaine the how, the why of what we’re doing. We take time to answer all their questions and then when we’d come out and we do exactly what we say we’re going to do.
Okay. So let me give you a scenario. And this is a scenario for anyone in the region who’s listening. You got a house in town? 60 70 foot lot. Okay. It’s a bungalow. You got a driveway going up the right side. Okay. Right. You’ve got a full covered porch on the front. You got a deck off the rear and then on the left side of the house you got about eight foot to the fence and then the other 8 feet to the other neighbor’s house. Are you limited and where you can put an egress window?
Yeah, you are. Um, we find that a lot in the older type home type homes. That’s a, you know, dependent. So every municipality has their own rules of set back. You have to know, you know, look into that what it is. And every municipality…
You’ll double check.
Yeah.
Okay. So that’s important. You’ll do the homework for the homeowner. Yes. A lot of guys say, Oh, I’m not going to pull a permit. We’ll just say it was here. And you know, you hear that a lot too. I bet.
Oh yeah. I’ve had some people say, oh, somebody told us we didn’t need a permit for that. I always tell people, listen, let us get the permit. Let us work with the permit. It’s for your protection. My protection. Everybody’s happy.
Okay. So there’s two kinds of basement walls that are the majority. There’s the block wall and then there’s poured wall. Does it make a difference when you’re installing when you’re installing an egress window? Do you have to use a different setting for a different install or what is it? What’s the difference?
Well, um, with poured walls, uh, we have a wall saw. It’s the latest technology. It’s an electric wall saw it has a 24 inch blade, goes right through. With the block wall. You know, we, we do all the cutting from outside. Either way we have handsaws, a concrete cutting chain saw. So we do both block and poured walls every day.
So it makes no difference?
Really no difference. There’s some little minor things that we have to watch out for, but, and we can do a nice install either way.
It makes sense to me. A egress window gets installed in a day, two days. What? Assuming we have decent weather.
So it’s a one day operation. We show up, we kind of take over the neighborhood. We got a couple of dump trucks, couple equipment trailers, a tool truck. But we show up in the morning and by the like four or five o’clock you have an installed window, air, water tight, ready to go.
Speaking of watertight. So I’m thinking to myself, okay, if I have a house and I need an egress window and I, you know, have poured walls and I’m all excited cause I paid extra when I built my house for the lifetime waterproof warranty on the foundation right. Now here I got a guy coming in and I did my homework and I eat, ended up with Easy Exit Egress Windows. But I say to you, hey man, listen, here’s what I got. I’m a little fearful because I paid all this extra for this warranty and the warranty says if I touch the wall or my alter and modify anything, then it’s not going to be warranted. How can I as a homeowner feel secure, safe and good about you guys coming in and helping me?
So when we, the main thing is the drainage of the well, so you don’t want water building up in there. So when we excavate down, we go down, we tie into the drain tile system of the house, we make sure that that drain tile is functioning the right way. Um, we never, if there’s ever a problem with that drain, we’ll address it. We don’t go forward and just say, oh, that’s their problem later and we tie into that drain. We pea-stone it. Uh, you’re going to have excellent drainage in that spot and the drainage is within that well, so everything on the outside of it’s going to be sealed off. It’s not gonna matter.
Okay. And now have you ever dug a foundation and then all of a sudden you see like there’s no drain tile, it’s missing stuff and you’re like, hey Mmrs homeowner, look what we found.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s so we, um, sometimes it’s by design. There’s a few, uh, these, uh, prefabricated walls that are built in a factory pinned together set and they build them up on to, um, gravel. So, so the code is, as long as you have drain well gravel there, there doesn’t need to be a drain tile or sometimes on a lake, like lake homes, they’re built up on sand. There’s no drain tile because they’re up high and it, but what we do is we still put a drain down there. We still pea-stone it, we treat it so the w the natural drainage that they’ve had is always gonna drain.
What kind of warranty you offer homeowners when you put it in an egress window?
And so, um, you know, you have the factory warranty on the window that we’re using, but we give, you know, standard warranty usually given by a builder when they’re 18 months, we will give a two year warranty on our installation.
If someone calls you in three years if there’s a little bit of a leak, you’re going to go out and look at it?
Oh yeah, definitely. Uh, I, I always tell people, listen, we’re a family business. We stand behind our work. If there’s a problem, you call us, we’ll come out and take a look at it. If you know it’s something that is wrong that we’ve done, we’re especially going to help you out with it. If it’s something faulty, you know, we always take care of our customers.
Well, from what I know, you guys do great work. I mean, I’ve the feedback that we get at Hire It Done is that you are A+. Well, so congratulations.
Thank you.
What kind of challenges are you having running a business this year?
For me it’s just finding time to do like I get a lot of people telling me I should be on social media more and do things and I’m…
You sold out, right? You can’t handle more work? You’re busy right now so someone calls you, you can come out and give him a price. Can we get the egress window in this year? Is it, is there a weather dependent or is a better when it’s cold?
Well we do them all year round. I mean, you know, but the weather, I always am up front with people saying, listen, if you know the weather is a factor, so you know, we’ll do the window and if we get a good day, let us come out and do it. You know, it’s always rough trying to work around. Everyone wants to be home, watched the whole job and stuff.
Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Do you ever do videos at your work? I’ve tried. I’ve tried to do it with my phone…
Let us come out and video an egress install that way. You do what you do, we’ll do what we do and we’ll call it a home run. That’s what we’ll do. Maybe this spring.
Yeah, that would be great.
I like that. What’s your favorite food? Pasta. So anything, pasta, Lasagna, you know spaghetti.
You make a mean in Lasagna?
No. You know what? I don’t cook well.
You’re Italian But you know some in your family’s gotta.
Yeah, well you know we, we’re all spoiled by my mom. She, she cooked everything and you stay out of her kitchen. So I ate out a lot.
Your mom make a mean gravy?
Yes she does.
I learned the word gravy from watching the sopranos. Gimme a little gravy. I love that.
So Anthony, uh, egresswindowinstallation.com is your website.
Yes.
Someone calls you come out within a week to take a look at it?
Yeah. Okay. And then if they wanted to do it, how far out are you?
We’re probably anywhere from four to six weeks to depending on weather.
I’m so happy that that’s the people know that average quickly, quickly, average price of an egress window. Assuming good conditions.
You look in typical egress job’s going to be somewhere right around $3,500.
It’s a steal. As far as I’m concerned, I used to be 7,500 and that was 10 years ago. Unbelievable. That’s a value. Right? That’s good man. I appreciate it. Well, listen, thanks for coming in.
Thank you for having us.
Good to have you my friend. Well folks, that wraps up our first hour, but don’t worry, we’ve got one more to go and even better when we talk windows, roofing, insulation, all kinds of tips. I’m Adam Helfman, you’re listening to the Hire It Done Radio Network.
